RMCA literature published elsewhere
Publication details
Roll, U., Feldman, A., Novosolov, M., Allison, A., Bauer, A.M., Bernard, R., Böhm, M., Castro-Herrera, F., Chirio, L., Collen, B., Colli, G.R., Dabool, L., Das, I., Doan, T.M., Grismer, L.L., Hoogmoed, M., Itescu, Y., Kraus, F., Lebreton, M., Lewin, A., Martins, M., Maza, E., Meirte, D., Nagy, Z.T., de Campos Nogueira, C., Pauwels, O.S.G, Pincheira-Donoso, D., Powney, G.D., Sindaco, R., Tallowin, O.J.S, Torres-Carvajal, O., Trape, J.-F., Vidan, E., Uetz, P., Wagner, P., Wang, Y., Orme, C.D.L, Grenyer, R. & Meiri, S. 2017. ‘The global distribution of tetrapods reveals a need for targeted reptile conservation’. Nature Ecology & Evolution. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0332-2. URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0332-2.pdf (PR).
Article in a scientific Journal / Article in a Journal
The distributions of amphibians, birds and mammals have underpinned global and local conservation priorities, and have been
fundamental to our understanding of the determinants of global biodiversity. In contrast, the global distributions of reptiles,
representing a third of terrestrial vertebrate diversity, have been unavailable. This prevented the incorporation of reptiles into
conservation planning and biased our understanding of the underlying processes governing global vertebrate biodiversity. Here,
we present and analyse the global distribution of 10,064 reptile species (99% of extant terrestrial species). We show that rich-
ness patterns of the other three tetrapod classes are good spatial surrogates for species richness of all reptiles combined and of
snakes, but characterize diversity patterns of lizards and turtles poorly. Hotspots of total and endemic lizard richness overlap
very little with those of other taxa. Moreover, existing protected areas, sites of biodiversity significance and global conserva-
tion schemes represent birds and mammals better than reptiles. We show that additional conservation actions are needed to
effectively protect reptiles, particularly lizards and turtles. Adding reptile knowledge to a global complementarity conservation
priority scheme identifies many locations that consequently become important. Notably, investing resources in some of the
world’s arid, grassland and savannah habitats might be necessary to represent all terrestrial vertebrates efficiently.